Don’t Prioritize Your Tasks
We've all been told the way to successfully manage our tasks is to prioritize them. Many systems and methodologies supply a structure to define the priority of tasks to be completed as part of their structure. Unfortunately, this often fails because of how they define priority.
Almost all definitions around priority include the term “importance” in some manner. This does not help us understand what warrants an important task. Is it important because it needs to be done right away? Is it important because it affects our long-term goals? Is it important because it has been mandated by someone else? See the confusion?
I recommend replacing “importance” with “impact” when evaluating your tasks. What is the impact this task will have on me and my work? If it is a low-impact task, it may be completed but it will not make a significant difference in my well-being or professional development. If it is a high-impact task it may require additional discovery and understanding as the ripples caused by its completion can be far-reaching.
How do you create an “impact scale” to apply to your tasks? There are four questions you can apply to any task to determine its impact:
What will happen if this task is not completed successfully?
Do I feel prepared to complete this task successfully?
Is this task connected to other tasks?
Are other people dependent on the success of this task?
Each one of these questions helps frame the task in relation to other tasks. By creating this interrogatory framework, we can be comfortable with the understanding that each task is being evaluated equally and objectively.
Beginning with question one, we determine if this task needs to be completed at all or if it can immediately be deferred or discarded. This immediate triage of tasks makes determining impact easier and more efficient.
Question two goes to the amount of preparation necessary for the task. Remember that impact is not a positive or negative but a cumulative measure of the task. If a task has a large amount of preparation required, that can impact other tasks through a reduction in available time, energy, and resources.
Question three focuses on the relationship between tasks. In waterfall project methodologies, there is a concept around just that: task relationships. You will often see tasks identified as being “finish to start”, “start to start,” “finish to finish,” etc. What this refers to is does this task have a driving impact on another task. If a task is in a “finish to start” relationship with the next task to done, it means the next task cannot be started before the prior task is completed. This has a clear impact on both tasks, often evolving to the critical path – that series of tasks that must be complete to reach a successful finality of the project. “Finish to finish” refers to two or more tasks that must be finished at the same time due to some requirements of the tasks. This often impacts scheduling, as you need to know when to begin the longer of the two tasks so they can complete in union. As you can see in the relationship definitions, knowing the impact of a task is far more important than setting a priority on a task.
Question four speaks to the ripple effect tasks can have for other people. If you have someone depending on a task to be completed that can raise the impact of that task for both you and them. Noting that in your planning goes a long way to doing the right things at the right times. This is one of the few times I do recommend adding the nuance of importance and urgency to your evaluation. Others can press that a task is “urgent” when it is important for them, and they failed to address it with urgency. You must be careful not to allow external measures of others unduly derail your evaluation of task impact.
Putting this process into motion is simpler than one would expect. Apply a score of five points to every task. For each question you answer above that indicates the task has a high impact, deduct one point. Some tasks will wind up with a score of three, two, or even one. (If you have a task that retains a score of five, push it to the side because it is a low-impact task.)
Most task management tools allow you to assign a “priority” to a task. For example, Todoist allows a priority of one through four to be assigned to each task. Swap priority with impact and you can use the feature in the software to show your own impact criteria and help organize your tasks.
